Artificial intelligence can go wrong – but how will we know?

Every time we hear that “artificial intelligence” was behind something – from creating images to inventing recipes to writing a description of a photo – we thought was uniquely human, you’ll see someone worrying about the dangers of AI either making humans redundant, or deciding to do away with us altogether. But the real danger isn’t a true artificial intelligence that’s a threat to humanity – because despite all our advances, it isn’t likely we’ll create that. What we need to worry about is creating badly designed AI and relying on it without question, so we end up trusting “smart” computer systems we don’t understand, and haven’t built to be accountable or even to explain themselves. Self-taught expert systems Most of the smart systems you read about use machine learning.…